Category: gratitude

Balloon Fiesta

This weekend kicked off the 40th Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. I was in Southern New Mexico (and had a great time!!!) but wasn’t able to roll up to Albuquerque to check it out…which leaves me kind of heartbroken.

I’d wanted to be there this year, but I have to be a grownup or something and be at work this week. Durnitalltoheck!

But thanks to my friend and fellow blogger NewMexiKen, you too can experience what it’s like to see how a hot air balloon gets inflated.

His description and photos match my personal experience to a tee. Well done Ken!


Read: The Albuquerque Box





Photo copyright 2011, NewMexiKen


The Worries of a Country Kid

As you read this, I’ll be winging my way over California and Arizona and on my way to New Mexico.

Look up and wave hi if you see me coming by.

I’m headed back to Southern New Mexico for a purpose.

As I’ve told you, I take my job as co-madre very, very seriously. I love the two daughters of my best friend with such intensity that sometimes I forget I didn’t carry them inside my own body.

They matter that much.

My baby girls, now 8 and 11, are part of their local 4-H and this year they took on the project of raising pigs. They worked very hard at this, including helping their dad clear an empty space in their yard and building the pig barn.

Every day they feed and medicate and care for those little oinkers. They text me photos. They tell me how cute they are. Those girls are in love with their little piggies.

This weekend is the final part of the process: an auction at the Southern New Mexico State Fair.

I never raised show animals myself, but most of my friends did. I know from experience that the auction can be really difficult.

Really difficult.

Especially the first time through.

As my friend said, “get ready for big crying.”

And I am. I think.

The Good Man and I will join forces with my best friend and her husband and we’ll hug those kids as hard as we can and try to make it better.

Because in the end, I’ll probably be the one crying the hardest. It hurts when my little ones hurt.

This is the dilemma of a country kid. It’s part of their 4-H training, learning to raise and care for animals, but knowing that these animals are also part of the food chain.

Most people don’t look at a bag of groceries and understand where, exactly the food came from. People think beef just comes in patties like that. Eggs are created in foam containers. Milk is mixed up back in the stockroom.

My girls know better. My girls are savvy and strong. They know the land and how to create sustenance from it. They join the long line of proud agricultural New Mexicans.

And so they’ll cry a little and grow up a little and learn a lot.

Or, hell, they might both grow up to be vegetarians after this experience. Who knows?

Wish me luck! I’m going in!





Photo by Gareth Weeks and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


Guest Blogging

Hi! Today we’re going to mix it up a bit. You’ll find my Friday post over on a wonderful blog called Into The Bardo.

This blog is a collaborative effort of three friends who all face serious health conditions. They created this blog to provide a forum to explore a variety of topics with talent, humor and verve. Post authors include the three main editors, their family and friends and include a number of notable poets and writers.

I was honored to be asked to contribute an essay for their “Perspectives on Cancer” series. I wrote a piece about my paternal grandmother.

Writing this essay has proven to be a magical experience for me. I’m very close to an Aunt on my dad’s side, and I sent her an early editorial layout of the piece as I very much wanted her approval before publishing. She not only approved, but sent it out to many of my cousins, some of whom I’ve only met once or twice.

I’m getting email from around the world to discuss this piece and our grandparents and the connection to my extensive family has touched me very deeply.

So please, give me a click today and go read my piece:

The Divining Trunk

Thanks much, and happy weekend to us all!



That’s my grandma and me in 1976.

Photo from the family archives and Copyright Karen Fayeth, 2011


Gimme Some Weird, People

Today I’m going to lean heavy on my New Mexico readers, or travelers to and fans of New Mexico.

Been feeling a little homesick, so I took to Google for searches about New Mexico.

Of course there are all the sites dedicated to the aliens, the cattle mutilations, La Llorona and the chupacabra.

And I find a LOT of sites that want to tell me how weird my homestate is.

Weird huh. Is it?

Hmmmm. I don’t think it’s weird at all.

I came across a list of “New Mexico Attractions and Oddities” and went through the list.

Honestly, is it just because I’m from there? I didn’t find many of these things to be odd at all.

Examples:

The Chevy on a stick in ABQ. Ok, ok, I remember when that was first going up and there was a hubbub, but hardly what I’d called genuinely weird.

And the big green dinosaur, also is ABQ.

But are these really all that weird? Or just…um…bad taste?

Speaking of bad taste, how about the scrap metal roadrunner in Alamogordo or the recycled roadrunner in Las Cruces…or the auto parts dinosaur, also in Alamogordo. Not art, but not weird.

Or how about the big metal glasses in Taos. I mean, it’s Taos fer chrissakes. The whole town is a half bubble off level.

Then there’s the “mysterious/religious” stuff like all the spontaneous healing at Santuario de Chimayo with the crutches left behind, the shrine at the top of Mount Cristo Rey or the image of Magdalena in the side of the hill in Magdalena (outside of Socorro).

All sort of your garden variety stuff, filed under “mystical.” But weird? Nah.

And of course there’s all of the natural formations: Camel Rock, Shiprock, and the Kneeling Nun to name a few. All fascinating works of geology, but hardly weird.

The rock formation that gives you the thumbs up going into Laughlin, NV and flips you off on the way out is WAY more weird than any of that. **

And remember when the Burning of Zozobra used to be kind of weird before those frapping Burning Man people went mainstream? Now everyone just thinks New Mexico ripped off the idea (we were burning Old Man Gloom first, you damn hippies!)

I dunno, maybe it’s just the desert heat that leads people to believe that the good people and place of New Mexico are weird. I suppose to someone who has never seen such wide-open spaces and deep blues skies, it could all be a little scary.

But weird? Pfffft. No way. I live near San Francisco. Now that’s weird.

Blame The Good Man for this post topic. We got into a conversation about why New Mexico put “USA” on their license plates (a vague attempt to get around “One of our Fifty is Missing” troubles, I think).

The conversation drifted into new slogans to add to the plate as we bandied them back and forth.

The winner being: “New Mexico…you don’t know who we are and we don’t like you anyway.”

They can take their “weird” and go jump in a lake.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

If any of ya’ll New Mexicans know of something really weird I’ve overlooked, let me know. I’m open to suggestions.







New Mexico sign image Copyright 2007, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the terms of the Creative Commons license found in the right hand column of this page.

** Nevada rock formation images from Life is a Road Trip.


When Just One Word Doesn’t Get It Done

Today, a trip into the wayback machine to answer a question that was posed to me: What is the funniest non-real word you’ve ever heard?

It was the mid-1990’s and I was a fresh faced college grad. I had a financial calculator under one arm and an ink-not-quite dry MBA under the other.

After just a year of working as a financial analyst for a large aerospace company, I was offered a job at Sandia Labs.

The hiring manager told me that it was ok that I had no background in the business of purchasing, they would be more than happy to bring me on and train me.

I was too naive to really understand that opportunities like this didn’t come along very often. Even less so these days.

So I took the job. I landed at one of New Mexico’s largest employers and I had a lot to learn. I worked for one of the best managers I’ve ever had (he’s still a friend and mentor) and I learned how to be a government procurement agent.

It was a move that would shape the next twenty years of my career. In lots of ways.

My desk was situated next to a tall lanky guy who had worked at Sandia for some twenty or more years. He was a bit outrageous, opinionated and wickedly intelligent.

He was the guy who knew EVERYTHING about the procurement systems, the department and the rules of the road. He was like a walking encyclopedia and we hit it off right away. It was fun to learn from him.

One day, I heard him tapping away at his desk while he was on the phone with a supplier that he supported. He was growing ever more frustrated with the supplier rep on the other end of the phone (and I think she was being snappish at him).

He hung up the phone and sighed…”what a coleslaw bitch.”

Wha?

My brows furrowed. A coleslaw bitch? What the heck is that?

So I asked.

He laughed. “No, not a coleslaw bitch. A cunslubitch. She is such a pain in the ass she deserves not one but three insults. It’s my three favorite words mashed together.”

Oh.

Wow.

Right here at work.

That’s really something.

Then I started laughing. It was so outrageous and so perfect and so YEAH MAN that I couldn’t help it. What a terrific concatenation of words. Useful!

That was the better part of twenty years ago and I still remember that word. And every now and again a supplier rep (male or female, doesn’t really matter) will work that last nerve, step over that last line, bully me just a little bit to far and get my procurement dander right up….

And I’ll think….what a cunslubitch.

I learned well from the master.